Embodiments of the invention described in this specification relate generally to consumer-focused communication and marketing, and more particularly, to consumer data aggregation systems used in consumer-focused communication and marketing.
Companies, organizations, and many other entities (hereinafter referred to individually as “company” or collectively as “companies”) that deal directly with consumers have a vested interest in communicating with and marketing to possible interested consumers. Many customer relationship management systems that exist provide ways to manage and maintain consumer contact information. However, many times consumer contacts become stale or new systems get deployed and old customer contacts are lost. This is problematic for any company that intends to maintain communication with consumer contacts.
Even when consumer data is retained, the usefulness of the consumer data is typically spotty. For instance, such consumer data, obtained over any duration of time, typically lacks parameters or other indicators that allow the data to be organized by customer segment, category, and/or usage patterns. Yet these are a few critical representations of data, which when organized accordingly, allows targeted marketing and accurate consumer tracking.
Therefore, what is needed is a way to assist companies to recapture lost customer and consumer contacts and acquire new customers and consumer leads in order to target and track specific consumers by distribution of physical collateral, such as reward cards, direct mailings, savings and member-discount cards, fobs (e.g., self-authenticating and identifying devices typically latched to a person's key chain), or by digital distribution using virtual cards or any other coded digital object distributed via email or web-based sign up, and thereby identify such consumers by customer segment, category, and usage information using pre-defined user rules.